Around Ephesus

Across the history of Ephesus, the city moved because its harbours silted up. The Küçük Menderes delta has been advancing into the sea since the fifth millennium BC, and each new harbour had to be dug further west than the last⁶. Strabo records the first move, from the hillside down to the plain around the Temple of Artemis⁷; Lysimachus made the second, to the walled Hellenistic city that is excavated today⁸.

The last move ran the other way, uphill and inland. After Arab raids in the 7th and 8th centuries the precinct of St John’s church was fortified, and the centre of Byzantine Ephesus shifted to Ayasuluk Hill¹. The lower city did not empty overnight: excavation south of the Church of Mary finds households there into the 12th century, then fields among the ruins, and a final flicker of use in the 14th⁹. The old city was deserted by the 15th century¹⁰, while the town on the hill carried on.

The Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders¹⁷, lay outside the Roman city and shares a World Heritage component with Ayasuluk Hill². Its stone outlived it: once the sanctuary was abandoned, its marble was quarried for the buildings of medieval Ayasuluk¹⁸. One column, pieced together from fragments, now marks the spot¹⁹, and there is no ticket to buy²⁰. John Turtle Wood located the temple on the last day of 1869²¹.

The hill at Selçuk is named after its church. Ayasuluk is the Turkish form of Hagios Theologos, “the holy theologian”, that is, St John, which Italian traders wrote as Altoluogo³. Christian tradition from the late 2nd century placed the apostle’s grave at Ephesus²², and over it stand the ruins of the Basilica of St John, the church that Justinian rebuilt on a domed, cross-shaped plan²³.

Two more monuments frame the church. Its precinct is entered through a gateway that 18th-century travellers misnamed the Gate of Persecution²⁴, and the summit above is crowned by a castle begun by the Byzantines and repaired under Turkish rule²⁵.

Turkish rule at Ayasuluk began with the town’s surrender in 1304²⁶, and the Aydınid beylik made it both a capital and a port trading with Venice and Genoa²⁷. An inscription over the west door dates the mosque to March 1375 and names its patron, the Aydınid ruler İsa Bey, and its architect, Ali ibn Mushaimish of Damascus²⁸. Until then the old basilica had served for a time as a mosque²⁹.

The good years did not last. The Ottomans under Bayezid I took the Aydın lands in 1390³⁰; Timur restored the Aydınid princes after his victory at Ankara in 1402, and his invasion damaged Ayasuluk³¹. Murad II made the region Ottoman for good, most likely in 1425, though 1426 is also given³². Like the temple site, the mosque is not a ticketed monument²⁰.

Travellers kept coming. Cyriacus of Ancona visited in the 15th century, and the Ottoman writer Evliya Çelebi described Ayasuluk in the mid-17th³³.

The museum in Selçuk holds the finds of the modern excavations, including the Roman statues of Artemis³⁴, the Colossal and the Beautiful Artemis among them³⁵. The Ministry lists sections on fountain finds, the Terrace Houses, coins, the Artemision, Artemis and the imperial cult, Çukuriçi Höyük, St John, the Ayasuluk fortress and the Belevi Mausoleum³⁶. Among the highlights it names are the Resting Warrior from the Pollio fountain group, a marble Marcus Aurelius and a head of Eros copied from Lysippos³⁷. The frieze of the Temple of Hadrian is here in the original, while the building on site carries casts³⁸, and so is the Polyphemus group from the State Agora³⁹.

Not everything stayed. The virtue statues from the façade of the Library of Celsus are in the Ephesos Museum in Vienna, a separate institution from the one in Selçuk, and copies stand in their place⁴⁰.

High on Bülbüldağ, the chapel of Meryem Ana Evi sits at about 380 m⁴¹. The belief that this was Mary’s last home grew out of what Anne Catherine Emmerich, an Augustinian nun in Westphalia, described in her visions to Clemens Brentano⁴², and priests from Smyrna identified the ruin in 1891⁴³. The tradition that she died in Jerusalem is older and more widely held⁴⁴, and the Catholic Church has not pronounced on the house, though it encourages pilgrimage there⁴⁵. Muslim women and men also come to pray, honouring Maryam⁴⁶. No bus or train goes up to the shrine¹². With the tomb of St John and the Seven Sleepers, the House of the Virgin Mary belongs to the wider story of Sacred Ephesus.

On the slope of Panayırdağ, near the ancient city, is the cave associated with the legend of the Seven Sleepers⁴⁷. In the Christian legend, young Christians fleeing the persecution under Decius took refuge in the cave, were sealed inside, and woke in the reign of Theodosius II⁴⁸. Its oldest surviving form is a verse homily in Syriac by Jacob of Serugh⁴⁹. The Qur’an has its own account in Sura 18, al-Kahf⁵⁰, where only God knows how many slept: people guessed three, five or seven, each time counting a dog⁵¹.

When the Austrian Archaeological Institute dug the site in the late 1920s it found a late-antique cemetery with a cave church⁵²: several hundred graves from the 5th and 6th centuries, inscriptions calling on the Seven Sleepers, and a great many terracotta lamps⁵³. Ephesus is not the only claimant. According to Turkey’s Ministry of Culture, most Muslims place the Qur’anic cave at Tarsus or Afşin, whereas Christian tradition settled on Ephesus, and there are further claimants at al-Raqim near Amman, at Damascus and in Nakhchivan⁵⁴.

Çukuriçi Höyük is a prehistoric settlement mound and a World Heritage component in its own right, all 1.5 ha of it². When the first Neolithic farmers settled here, the shore was only some 1.5 km away, close enough for direct access to the Aegean⁵⁵. After its Neolithic phase, about 6700–5900 BC, the mound lay deserted for over two and a half millennia before people returned around 3300–3000 BC, and it was given up for good around 2750 BC⁵⁶. After first excavations by the Selçuk museum, systematic research ran from 2006 to 2014 under Barbara Horejs, funded by the Austrian Science Fund and the European Research Council⁵⁷.

About 14 km north-east of Ephesus stands the early Hellenistic Mausoleum of Belevi, a massive square podium with sides of about 29.65 m, once crowned by a Corinthian colonnade. It is the second-largest mausoleum in Anatolia after the one at Halicarnassus¹⁴. Its sculpture, including an unfinished sarcophagus with a reclining figure and reliefs of funeral games and a battle with centaurs, is divided between the Ephesus Museum in Selçuk and the İzmir Archaeology Museum⁵⁸.

Up in the hills some 8 km east of Selçuk, Şirince has about 450 residents, and in 2023 UN Tourism named it one of its Best Tourism Villages⁵⁹. Until the early 1920s it was a Greek Orthodox village whose everyday language was Turkish. Most of its Greek families left after September 1922, and from 1924 it was resettled by Muslims from Greece under the population exchange⁶⁰.

Its name has its own story. The village was called Çirkince, and in the early years of the Republic the governor of İzmir, Kazım Dirik Pasha, ordered it renamed Şirince; the tales explaining the old name, which can be read as “ugly”, are legends⁶¹. The Orthodox villagers had already venerated the ruin now known as the House of Mary, with a pilgrimage each 15 August, a custom documented from the 19th century⁶². Orthodox Christians still traditionally gather at Şirince on that feast day⁶³.

The Kuşadası cruise port lies some 19 km from the Ephesus Lower Gate by road¹⁵. Off its shore, joined by a causeway, is Güvercinada or Pigeon Island, whose castle Türkiye’s UNESCO Tentative List entry describes as Genoese: roughly 350 by 200 m, with four towers around a small citadel. The island and the town walls went on that list in April 2020⁶⁴.

The Dilek Peninsula–Büyük Menderes Delta National Park covers 27,675 ha: the peninsula was protected in 1966 and the delta added in 1994. Its highest point, Dilek Tepe, reaches 1,237 m, and it lies about 24 km from Kuşadası by road⁶⁵.

Priene, Miletus, the Temple of Apollo at Didyma, Aphrodisias and Hierapolis at Pamukkale are all on the Ministry’s ticketed list⁶⁶. By road Priene is about 60 km from the Ephesus Lower Gate and Didim 95 km; Pamukkale is about 199 km away¹³.

The walk from Selçuk railway station to the Lower Gate is about 3.5 km¹¹. İZBAN commuter trains run as far as Selçuk, but anyone coming from İzmir or its airport has to change at Tepeköy to a separate shuttle⁶⁷. Routes and options are laid out on getting to Ephesus, current prices on tickets and opening hours, and the ground plan on the Ephesus map.